Aral Sea 121
China to Europe. These ancient populations of
Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and other ethnicities
prospered as farmers, fishermen, herders, mer-
chants, and craftsmen.
Things changed after the Uzbek S.S.R. be-
came part of the fledgling Soviet empire in
the early 1920s and Stalin decided to turn
his Central Asian republics into giant cotton
plantations. But the arid climate in this part
of the world is ill suited to growing such a
thirsty crop, and the Soviets undertook one
of the most ambitious engineering projects
in world history, hand-digging thousands of
miles of irrigation canals to channel the water
from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya into the
surrounding desert.
“Up until the early 1960s the system was
fairly stable,” explained Philip Micklin, when I
reached him by phone. As a geography profes-
sor at Western Michigan University, Micklin
spent his career studying water management
issues in the former Soviet Union and made
about 25 trips to Central Asia, starting in the
early 1980s. Over the years he watched the Aral
Sea’s demise firsthand. “ When they added even
more irrigation canals in the 1960s, it was like
the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s
back,” he said. “Suddenly the system was no
longer sustainable. They knew what they were
doing, but what they didn’t realize was the full
range of the ecological consequences—and the
rapidity with which the sea would vanish.”
By 1987 the Aral’s water level had dropped
drastically, splitting it into two bodies of water:
a northern sea, which lies in Kazakhstan, and
a larger southern sea lying within Karakalpak-
stan. In 2002 the southern sea got so low that
it too split into separate eastern and western
seas. Last July the eastern sea dried up entirely.
The only bright spot in this dire saga is the
recent recovery of the northern sea. In 2005,
with funding from the World Bank, the Kazakhs
completed an eight-mile dam on the northern
sea’s southern shore, creating a fully separate
body of water, fed by the Syr Darya. Since the
dam was built, the northern sea and its fishery
have come back much more quickly than ex-
pected. But the dam has cut off the southern sea
from one of its crucial water sources, sealing
its fate.
“The saddest and most frustrating thing
about the tragedy of the Aral Sea is that the
Soviet officials at the Ministry of Water who
designed the irrigation canals knew full well
that they were dooming the Aral,” Kamalov
says. From the 1920s through the 1960s, water
2006
2010
2014
Mark Synnott explored Oman rock climbing in
the January 2014 issue. Carolyn Drake photo-
graphed shamans for a December 2012 story.